How Together and Crusoe are reducing the carbon impact of generative AI

Together and Crusoe are excited to announce our partnership—working together to build and deliver state of art generative AI using carbon reducing compute resources. This means we can train AI models in a way that benefits the environment, instead of adding more carbon emissions and expending valuable energy.

As many people in the industry know, training, fine-tuning and even using large, generative AI models requires a lot of compute. As a point of reference, the total collective cost of training and evaluating the GPT-3, BLOOM, OPT and LLaMA foundation models took approximately 4300 MWh, which translates to an equivalent carbon cost of 1,500 metric tons of CO2.

Together is building the Together Decentralized Cloud, a collection of nodes from across the Internet, to distribute the load and make more efficient use of collective compute resources. Even with Together’s efficient communication compression and parallel training methods, running this system still requires a significant amount of energy. That’s where Crusoe comes in.

Together is not just building the next generation platform for generative AI—we’re building it with a mission to create an open ecosystem that produces the best artificially intelligent systems for humanity. That includes reducing the impact of AI models on our planet. As part of this mission, Together deeply values sustainability and has developed a green zone as part of the Decentralized Cloud. This green zone includes compute resources that significantly reduce carbon emissions and is supported by Crusoe. Together recently released OpenChatKit, which includes a set of generative AI models that were exclusively trained on this green zone.

Crusoe Cloud mitigates the environmental impact of compute through climate-aligned solutions that capture wasted energy, and Crusoe is empowering innovators like Together to solve the world's biggest challenges with climate-aligned computing technology. Crusoe has pioneered innovative infrastructure that utilizes stranded, wasted or clean energy to power the compute resources we need to drive our shared progress and reduce its environmental impact.

The GPUs in the green zone of the Together Decentralized Cloud are powered by Crusoe’s Digital Flare Mitigation® (DFM) systems, which utilize flared natural gas – a byproduct of oil production that is wastefully burned without a beneficial use when it is stranded. DFM systems are deployed directly to oil wellsites to convert this otherwise wasted and stranded gas into the electricity that powers modular data centers operating high-performance computing workloads. Crusoe’s technology also helps oil producers reduce methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas, which escape during the flaring process. Crusoe’s utilization of otherwise wasted flared gas has reduced flaring by billions of cubic feet and has prevented methane emissions equivalent to removing approximately 170,000 gasoline-powered cars from the road.

In addition to reducing energy waste by creating a beneficial use for the natural gas onsite, Crusoe’s Digital Flare Mitigation solution is also able to power advanced computing needs without putting additional demands on the energy grid. Energy demand for data centers is skyrocketing, and 60% of electricity in the U.S. is still generated from fossil fuels. So, displacing AI workloads from the grid by using previously wasted energy sources further reduces the environmental impact of our data centers and propels the innovation and capabilities of companies like Together that are driving meaningful change.

Crusoe’s mission is to align the future of computing with the future of the climate.

“Looking ahead, Crusoe will be harnessing stranded energy from clean and renewable sources via our Digital Renewable Optimization solution to power our data centers, to continue our journey of providing scalable, clean, low-cost cloud solutions for compute-intensive applications”

— Chase Lochmiller, Crusoe Co-Founder and CEO

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With the help of partners like Crusoe, Together is building an open ecosystem where participants can contribute to the advancement of AI while reducing the impact on our planet.

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